


Scissors

by archeradicators



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (just mentioned) - Freeform, Alternian Gender, Body Image, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, He's trans. Vriska is also here for ten seconds and she's also trans.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 17:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21341911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archeradicators/pseuds/archeradicators
Summary: Sometimes all it takes to realize you're extremely unhappy with yourself is to see someone else so explicitly happy with themselves. Sometimes you make rash decisions based on your level of happiness.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	Scissors

Girls are hard, and mean, and dangerous. They exist to be the strongest soldiers, the fastest killers, the brightest minds and thorough hands of the empire. They're brutal. They take what they want without hesitation and rage against any who get in their way. 

You're beginning to think that you might not belong to that club. 

It's dusk. You're four. Vriska has been outside for a little while feeding people to her nightmare lusus or otherwise having them webbed up in her nest, and you've been standing on your balcony watching her walk people into its gaping, slavering maw. You have your skirt in your fists, balled tight in abject terror, and you realize that if you don't do something to your mind she could just as easily do that to you some day. 

It's with an abrupt start that you realize that she's dangerous in a way that you absolutely could never see yourself being. You freeze. You keep your eyes trained on her reign of terror until your lusus picks you up and brings you inside, clearly attuned to your acute distress. 

You turn in his arms and wrap yours around his torso, and you keep yourself there for a little while, shaking like a leaf in a storm. He smooths your hair and huffs reassuringly, cradling you in his big, strong arms, and eventually you begin to calm down. Once you let go of him he sets you down, and you watch him lock the door to that balcony in an apparent attempt to keep you from seeing Vriska murder anyone else. You want to tell him that the murder isn't mostly why you're upset, but you don't. 

Instead, you quietly get up and grab a pair of scissors. 

See, Vriska recently started growing her hair out long. You asked her about it from your balcony one day, and she yelled across to you that she decided that she was going to be a girl! Girls have long hair, like you, she told you. If you're a girl, and you have long hair, well, she wasn't going to let you beat her there!

It made you uncomfortable at the time, but you weren't sure why. 

Aurthour lets you be independent. You always appreciated his distance while still being there for you when you wanted him to be. His lack of attention at this point though allows you to shear off all of your hair. You grab it in little chunky strands and haphazardly chop away at it in front of your bathroom mirror. You aren't careful. You don't really know what you're doing, but it feels like you're in control for once. 

When you're done, you look so ugly and terrible that you start sniffling. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the tall mirror along the wall and you almost scream in horror at the thing you see wearing your clothes. In your young mind, though, you realize that it isn't the person in the clothes that you hate so much. It's the clothes themselves that does it to you. You practically rip that skirt from around your waist and throw it to the ground as fast as you possibly could. 

And then you hop off of the little step stool you were standing on and walk slowly over to the mirror. You keep your hands firmly over your eyes, afraid of what you're going to see, and only uncover them when the cold metal of the mirror gently collides with your skin. 

It's a slow, painful process. You pull your damp, grimy fingers away from your eyes one by one, holding your breath all the while. It feels like it takes you forever to pull them away. It takes you longer still, after a couple of deep breaths, to finally open your eyes and look at yourself.  
The shorts are an immediate comfort. You always wore a pair underneath your skirts for privacy reasons, and you're immensely glad for that now. And... the rest of you looks the same as you always have. Minus your hair. Your heart sinks as you pull your hands through your newly chopped locks, frowning in the way that it chunks and sticks up in unfavorable places. You decide that you hate it.

You look behind you to see where your scissors went, to try to fix it, but you freeze. Aurthour is standing there, and he probably has been for a little while because he has them in his hands, and he's looking at you with the slight air of parental concern you've seen him give you when you make a decision he wouldn't approve of. 

You hardly blame him, especially if he saw your little episode just then. You keep your eyes on him and go to pick the discarded skirt off of the ground, but he shakes his head at you and beckons you over instead. You're trepidatious, but... Well, you also are a good listener, so you walk over to him without the skirt. 

He has you pull the stool over and sit on it, and instead of getting an earful about ruining your image as you're expecting, you get his hands steady on your head as he fixes the mess you made. The two of you are quiet, so quiet that even the snips are just barely whispered sound, but eventually you relax into the action. 

Maybe he isn't mad at you after all. Maybe he understands you. 

Maybe you're the luckiest kid on Alternia, to have such an understanding lusus. 

By the time he's satisfied, you hardly have any hair left on your head. You really must have done a dreadful job of the cut to begin with. You stand in front of the long mirror again and touch it. It looks like you let a buzz cut grow out for a few weeks. 

You really, honestly, can't be happy with this either. 

But you are happy without the skirt. You decide that even if trying to be a boy instead doesn't work out for you, well, at least you learned that you hate skirts more than anything else you can think of off of the top of your head at the moment. 

So you beam up at him, and he pats your back.


End file.
